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Introduction

OpenStack is one of the most popular open source cloud computing projects to provide Infrastructure as a Service solution. Its key core components are Compute (Nova), Networking (Neutron, formerly known as Quantum), Storage (object and block storage, Swift and Cinder, respectively), Openstack Dashboard (Horizon), Identity Service (Keystone) and Image Servie (Glance).

There are other official incubated projects like Metering (Celiometer) and Orchestration and Service Definition (Heat).

Savanna is a Hadoop as a Service for OpenStack introduced by Mirantis. It is still in an early phase (v.02 has been released in Summer, 2013) and according to its roadmap version 1.0 is targeted for official OpenStack incubation. In principle, Heat also could be used for Hadoop cluster provisioning but Savanna is especially tuned for providing Hadoop specific API functionality while Heat is meant to be used for generic purpose .

Savanna Architecture

Savanna is integrated with the core OpenStack components such as Keystone, Nova, Glance, Swift and Horizon. It has a REST API that supports the Hadoop cluster provisioning steps.

Savanna API is implemented as a WSGI server that, by default, listens to port 8386. In addition, Savanna can also be integrated with Horizon, the OpenStack Dashboard to create a Hadoop cluster from the management console. Savanna also comes with a Vanilla plugin that deploys a Hadoop cluster image. The standard out-of-the-box Vanilla plugin supports Hadoop 1.1.2 version.

Installing Savanna

The simplest option to try out Savanna is to use devstack in a virtual machine. I was using an Ubuntu 12.04 virtual instance in my tests. In that environment we need to execute the following commands to install devstack and Savanna API:

Then we need to create a nodegroup templates (json files) that will be sent to Savanna. There is one template for the master nodes (namenode, jobtracker) and another template for the worker nodes such as datanode and tasktracker. The Hadoop version is 1.1.2

Savanna UI via Horizon

In order to create nodegroup templates, to create cluster template and to create the cluster itself we have used a command line tool – httpie – to send REST API calls. The same functionality is also availabe via Horizon, the standard OpenStack dashboard.